For me the problem is not the common core standards, it is the amount of detail in them.

All of the Finnish National Standards for Math grades 1-9 fit on just 9 pages. In contrast, our K-8 Math Common Core Standards fit on 70 pages along with another 145 page appendix of requirements for grades 8-12. You could say that the US is easily 10 times more controlling in their standards.

This amount of detail reduces flexibility, ownership, and increases dependency on publishers and corporation produced curriculum and assessment. It leaves little room for education; to draw out and support the development of student’s unique talents. It leaves little time for teachers to realistically prepare thoughtful curriculum or accomodate for developmental differences. Instead it promotes a highly prescribed training of children.

In practice, preparing to be tested on the common core standards will now become the sole agenda for school. Micro-managing teaching and learning in this way invites a shallow, cursory covering of topics.

In contrast, Finland trusts its teachers and communities to continually develop and improve their own curriculum and assessments guided by broad, simple standards. National testing is only done for diagnostic purposes and has absolutely no implications for individual students or teachers.

This trust and broader leeway invites ownership and flexibility. It gives time for teachers to deeply know the developmental needs of their learners and for students to fully and robustly master concepts, rather than covering a huge unrealistic laundry list that can only happen in a perfect world with perfect students.

The effort to bring clarity and purpose to our educational system as a whole is important. But as every parent and teacher knows, over-controlling, micro-management results in lack of engagement and growth. Trust and simple, ongoing, predictable structure foster responsibility, engagement and optimal growth.

Do we want a nation of highly trained children, or highly educated children?

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Needless complexity is often a platform for veiled, self-interested agendas – as was seen in the near-incomprehensible financial vehicles that were sold by the big investment banks in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis – and are at best highly susceptible to break down.

Simplicity, directness and transparency are hard to devise, and harder to manipulate. That’s why, for example, VAM and school progress formulas are so opaque: it makes the political agendas that are driving them are easier to disguise, while also giving them a pseudo-scientific veneer.

I am hopeful that the Common Core and the punitive evaluation systems that accompany it will fall apart because of their inherent ponderousness, inflexibility and corruption, but teachers should nevertheless wake up to their dangers.

I think you’re right, Michael, that the Common Core will “fall apart” under the weight of its own educational uselessness, but the punitive evaluation systems will remain, unless we can thwart them before they gain the force of law. The “assessment boundaries” are all that matter to the corporate backers.

Diane has proposed a central strategy to stop the forced imposition of mandated high-stakes tests, through public pressure. Those are the monster’s “teeth”, and we do have the political power to muzzle it.

In my district, we’re “preparing for” the Common Core like it’s the Coming of Gozor or something. We’re “getting ready” to be evaluated on the basis of its canned assessments, whatever they turn out to be.

Promoters claim “the train has left the station”, but this teacher demonstrates it actually has no passengers on board. And, of course, this is a voluntary state initiative, right? We can shunt it safely off its track and park it on a side-spur, where states can experiment with the pedagogy, and even the canned assessments loaded onto it, without any corporate teeth in our necks.

People who argue they’d like to try out the new standards can do so, engage in voluntary assessments of whatever kind they choose, and let the world know how it goes.

You may very well be right; I was trying t be uncharacteristically optimistic.

Here in NYC, the Danielson-based evaluations appear to be put in place to both provide innumerable rationales for rating teachers ineffective, as well as providing a checklist for know-nothing, inexperienced administrators.

Two years ago when the CC ELA standards came out, our district curriculum director suggested that we use the ideas presented in Mike Schmoker’s book Focus; Elevating the Essentials. It was a brave move. As ELA coordinator at my building, I led our teachers in winnowing the CC for the few essential standards we would teach in depth, while we would ignore the itch to teach each and every standard. It was a successful idea with teachers who embraced it. We identified what we thought was truly important at each level and the resulting document was indeed very short and concise. Two years later, our director has succumbed to the widespread pressure to teach all the CC standards since we will be tested on them all. None of her peers supported her approach.

The world is being ask to accept the Common Core Standards and the associated assessments on a huge measure of good faith. I am not sure there has ever been an occassion where so many have been ask by so few to do so much! There is no data to review or evaluate regarding how the new Common Core will improve the education experience and prepare future citizens to live in a fast and every changing society. There is also no data on the assessments to make any kind of judgement about their validity and reliability. We are simply ask by the experts to trust us and we will do good for all. To make this change without a clear view of the cost as well as the effectiveness is just not appropriate for our educational system. I wonder what it would take for Arnie Duncan to realize that we should have a group to evaluate all this before it is forced upon all 50 states. We also need to know who will do the evaluation and how will it be done to determine if all the promises are actually delivered. We are already seeing the groups who agreed to prepare the new assessments claim that they have to shorten the proposed tests but i didn’t see either group suggest that they would give back half the money they were given. The sooner the world recognizes that this whole movement is driven by the corporate sujpports who expect to make billions on selling stuff that won’t ever be able to be shown to have made one single difference in preparing our future citizens.

To the question of whether we want highly trained or highly educated children, I say both. Are we really going to put on the rose colored glasses and think that ‘training’ is a completely dirty concept that none of our students will need? I’d argue that pretty much 90+% of the adults in the world will need what we’re calling ‘training’ (and using the term derisively).

Yes, it would be great if every adult were ‘educated’ in the broadest and best sense of the word. It is a different world than I live in if we are claiming that this will happen in the near future (our definitions of well-educated may be very different?). For many, a stable job and the ability to raise a family is of primary concern and importance. We overuse the everybody should go to college meme, and this is just an extension of that.

I understand that criticism of this thinking will say that I’m putting people down, saying that their capabilities are limited, and that not everyone can be anything that the want to be. I attended what was, and still is today, considered a good high school. Many of my good friends didn’t attend college and went into the skilled trades, opened businesses, etc. They weren’t failures. A huge percentage of them are making a better living than over-educated me. They have good lives and that is in part, because in addition to being educated, we were trained to be responsible adults.

Training is being able to do something because you’ve done it before. This is not inherently bad. In fact, you need some of that (study skills are trained, research skills are trained, math process skills are trained) but that’s not what we’re talking about. Training to take tests isn’t useful outside of school and leads to a false sense of accomplishment both for the adults and the students. It certainly doesn’t meet your standard of securing a good job. Not only this, but the number of jobs that stay the same over years or decades is much smaller than it used to be. Unless you want planned obsolescence, education (not training) is more and more vital.

I actually agree with you, that both training and education are important. The problem I see, is that driving everything with high stakes testing in this way reduces school to only test prep training at the expense of a broader education. Our common core standards have to be this specific because we are going to test the bejeezus out of them and then publicly rank order everyone’s performance. Teacher’s priorities now will focus on performance, not learning. Based on those scores we will close schools, withhold funding, and end careers.

In the face of that, who has time for music, art, civic engagement, or pursuing a unique interest not covered on the test? Who has time to actually use learning (and training) in a real life application? Who has time to engage students and families in learning on their own behalf, rather than scurrying to avoid being humiliated in the latest corporate performance data kept now on every child, teacher, and school?

I also think that the appropriateness of an emphasis on training for specific skills changes with a student’s age. More and more I see Kindergarten and 1st grade student’s day dominated by a frantic race to make sure they will test well at the expense of time to explore, develop curiosity, and a sense of ownership in their learning. I believe It makes more sense to develop a rich, developmentally appropriate foundation in primary students, and offer more and more specialized training, particularly in high school. Again, in Finland, students do not attend high school classes by age group, but in 6 week, specialized, self-selected courses including a rich offering of vocational training. A broad, robust background including opportunities to develop unique talents, and specific training together build a useful, worthwhile education.

I agree with you. I just wanted to make the point that ‘training’ isn’t a dirty word and that even in utopia it would be hard to have everyone ‘highly educated.’ It seems pretty clear that not everyone wants to be well educated.

All they want here are automatons except for the elite. It was that way also, just not as bad, when I was in high school in the early 60’s. I feel lucky that I did not go to public school. I want public school children to now get what I got back then. What a difference that would make. Wake up people.

The most important point this reader makes is that a teacher, to survive, will resort to pre-aligned teaching materials from educational publishers. I have begun to investigate the CCSS materials for English and I have trouble even finding what I need on line. Will I be forced to purchase even prepackaged Standards?

Great post, Diane. What I’d like to see us do as a country is drill down to understand how Finland develops its teachers. In Ana Partanen’s article regarding “What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success,” she states that teachers “are trained to assess children in classrooms using independent tests they create themselves. All children receive a report card at the end of each semester, but these reports are based on individualized grading by each teacher.”

It appears that there is a strong, well developed model for teacher training applied across the country. Moreover, Finnish teachers are required to have master’s degrees to prepare them for the Finnish system; these teacher training programs are highly selective, and teachers are paid well and highly respected. That seems to explain the essential difference between Finland and the United States. Our teachers require minimal training that lacks national coordination or an overall plan. Instead, our country develops a model, Common Core, imposed as a national standard without an overall plan to develop teachers who can advance it.

I sent this letter to the New York Time’s Op Ed page, but they didn’t publish it, so I thought I’d send it to you. It’s my small response. Dear New York Times, I work as a consultant in the New York City school system. In the past eleven years, I have been in to countless teacher’s classrooms to watch them teach. Later, we meet to discuss their lessons and I give them suggestions for improvement. There is one area for improvement that I rarely need to comment on, and that is the need for the teacher to like, even love, their students more. I taught in the Bronx for eight years before quitting in order to raise my own family. My colleagues and I took our mission seriously: to educate and inspire our students. We were also committed to an unspoken mission: to love and care for our students. One day, back in the 90’s before lock down drills were necessary, a meek, self-conscious girl was asked by her boyfriend to hide his gun. She put it in her backpack and brought it in to school. In the hall on the way to class, someone saw it. Needless to say, there was a response. At that moment, even the most annoying student in the class was under my care and protection, and I stepped out into the hall to usher all my students into my room, without a thought to my own safety. I was not alone in this action, all of the teachers in the school were similarly engaged. We brought the girl to a safe spot and called the safety agents to handle the gun. The teachers’ and administrators’ response was to help this girl understand how what she had done was wrong, and to protect our students by locking our solid metal doors. The vast majority of teachers I have worked with go into teaching because they have a mission to inspire and help children. It’s a vocation that requires daily courage, stamina, and grit. It is not a career you choose to make money, or because you can’t think of what else to do, or because you want summers off. The pay is too low, and the daily requirements are too daunting. So why do this difficult job? Most of the teachers I see love their job, and more importantly, love their students. There is love and compassion that I see in the acts of teachers as they struggle to reach a needy student, when they pay for a student to go on a field trip, buy an alarm clock for a chronically tardy kid, or bring in books bought with their own money. These are not rare acts, these are daily kindnesses. I hope people recognize that what the women at Sandy Hook did to protect their children were not unusual or rare acts for teachers. The people who go into teaching are heroes every day, and the protection those teachers offered to their students was only different in scale from the millions of small ways they offered care, compassion, and protection to their students on a daily basis. The acts of heroism that each teacher engaged in: lying to the gunman while her students hid to get him to leave the room, shielding the students’ bodies with her own, tackling the gunman in the hallway, squeezing students into a small dark closet and keeping them calm and quiet for 45 minutes, telling the students she has ushered into the bathroom that she loves them because that is the last thing she wants them to hear, pulling a child into a classroom as bullets flew over his head, ushering them quickly past scenes of unimaginable carnage; thankfully, the teachers that I know that would do the same are too numerous to count because they believe in that unwritten part of the job description: to love their students. I hope that one of the smaller outcomes from Sandy Hook will be that we all take a moment to appreciate our teachers just a little bit more. Sincerely, Dinah Gieske Consultant, NYC DOE

Thank you for sharing these insights and questions. Does anyone know of a place where educators are having the kind of discussion we so desperately need about Common Core? This is happening in snatches on many Facebook pages, and here and there in this blog format. I believe we desperately need a central place of sharing. For example, I am a middle-school English/Language Arts/Communications teacher especially concerned about the move away from fiction for our students, for whom for so many (including myself at their age) fiction is a life-saver, a life-line to themselves and to the rest of the world. The richness and connections with all of the arts bring to us and our children — to continue to move away from these things is soul-murder, future-murder. But how to respond? And what really is happening?

The 70% applies to overall reading, not to ELA. There the standards for fiction remain the same as ever, roughly the inverse of the overall, unless blind administrators insist otherwise. Then one does have a courage problem on one’s hands.

Thank you Harlan. In my district English/Language Arts curriculum is being rewritten as we speak to replace fiction with “informational text.” The wording itself is scary, as if fiction was not informational. I have a sense that my district is not the only one interpreting things this way. It is scary.

What this excessive detail also does is
(1) dictate the order of presentation of aspects of literacy
(2) encourage a direct teaching, skill-building approach to teaching.
Both of these consequences run counter to a massive amount of research and experience.

There is very good evidence from both first and second language acquisition that aspects of language and literacy are naturally acquired in a specific order that cannot be altered by instruction (C. Chomsky, 1969, The Acquisition of Syntax in Children from 5 to 10. Cambridge: MIT Press; Krashen, S. 1981, Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning, Pergamon Press, available at http://www.sdkrashen.com).

There is also very good evidence that we acquire language and literacy best not through direct instruction but via “comprehensible input” – for literacy, this means reading, especially reading that the reader finds truly interesting, or “compelling.” (Krashen, S. 2010.The Goodman/Smith Hypothesis, the Input Hypothesis, the Comprehension Hypothesis, and the (Even Stronger) Case for Free Voluntary Reading. In: Defying Convention, Inventing the Future in Literacy Research and Practice: Essays in Tribute to Ken and Yetta Goodman. P. Anders (Ed.) New York: Routledge. 2010. pp. 46-60. Available at http://www.sdkrashen.com)

I’m continuously concerned about the negativity around CCSS. These standards do not “force” us to teach anything in a specific manner (i.e., direct instruction). They allow teachers to know the end goal and teach students in the manner necessary for their developmental level using whatever materials the teacher desires (or district mandates). There aren’t any mandated materials in the CCSS – merely suggestions. The teachers I have worked with have seen the value of the standards because they have common language and a common goal; however, they still have professional judgement on how and when to teach those standards. While I do think we often “over test” our students, at least now those tests will now be aligned with the standards.

The standards themselves will not fix everything, but I don’t think the issue lies with the standards. Maybe the issue lies with how districts are presenting and allowing teachers to use the standards in their teaching.

This continuous testing and subjective measurement of students progress and assessment of teachers’ competency is purely a corporate boondogle that was introduced many years ago purely to divide the meager annual performance salary
adjustments that big business doles out to salaried workers while the big cheeses
whether they be upper management or ungodly paid superintendents get what amounts
to the lions share of money allocated for the entire organizational structure. You only have to look at the underlying ownership of privatized higher education entities to realize
that neither students nor teachers are the primary focus of corporate involvement in education. The corporate conglomerate or investment entities that control education
dollar grants and the federal loan, reimbursement, and payment apparatus exists to make millionaires of corporate management and consultants does a disservice to both
the students and highly educated teachers who are ultimately held responsible for their
students progress.

What disheartens me is the unthinking enthusiasm that most teachers and administrators seem to have for this. It’s like Common Core is the “new thing” from above and so we all should just follow it. We are so used to top-down management and following directives from senior level administrators that are educationally pointless that we’ve given up on reflective thought. Common Core is more of a symptom of what’s wrong with education in America that it is a solution.